We’re a little slow to respond to the advent of QR codes, but they’re coming.

QR codes—those funky looking matrix bar codes you see in magazines and on business cards, signs and direct mail, etc.—have been around for a while and are quite popular in some areas abroad. But stateside we’re still catching up with the phenomenon. QR, which stands for “quick response,” technology was developed in 1994 by Toyota to ID new cars, and the technology quickly spread to practically every industry under the sun, from publishing to dry cleaning.

Why? Because, when scanned by a smart phone with a QR code reader installed, this tiny block can link your Internet browser to all kinds of information, whether text, URLs, images, you name it. So, if you’re a magazine publisher, for example, and have a 5,000-word feature story about Barbados and only room enough in your publication for 1,200 words, you’re in luck. You put the additional 3,800 words on your website, along with the 500 photo outtakes, a “Win a Trip to Barbados” contest, lists of the island’s top hotels and restaurants, banner ads and links to the websites of your top travel-related advertisers, and voila, your modest magazine story is now a Library of Congress-sized wealth of information.

Maybe you run a boutique and in your display window you have a few pieces of sculpture by a popular local artisan. The three pieces you do have in stock are nice, but not quite what the window shopper had in mind. A quick scan of the aptly placed QR code instantly reveals not only the artist’s bio and images of his extensive line of sculptures, but also that you can have any one or more of the pieces drop shipped to the customer in one day. Hmmmm, suddenly this odd little block, peppered with dots and squiggles and doodads, is becoming increasingly clear.

Too space-age progressive to even contemplate now for your business? Think again. According to a recent study by Arbitron, smartphone ownership has tripled in the last two years, and by the end of 2011, it’s expected that 31 percent of all U.S. cell phone users will own a smartphone. There was a time when businesses “did just fine” without email and the Internet too. Ready or not, here it comes.